31 January 2013 – Filmoteca Española has recently given free online access to the Spanish newsreel NO-DO (Noticiarios y Documentales, 1943 – 1981). Users can also find a selection of feature films, shorts and documentaries, among them » Un perro andaluz » and other important films from the collections of Filmoteca Española. The videos were published in co-operation with Radio Televisión Española – RTVE.

3 September 2012 – This year’s Cinema Expert Group – Subgroup Film Heritage takes place at the Cinematek in Brussels on 16 October 2012. The Cinema Experts Group is annually organised by the Audiovisual and Media Policy Unit of the European Commission, where experts from all over Europe meet to discuss best practices and policies related to film heritage. Attendance to the meeting is by invitation only. Agenda updates and related documents are available on http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/reg/cinema/experts/index_en.htm

29 August 2012 – Presentations made at the ACE workshop « A digital agenda for film archives », held on 28 June in Bologna, are now available online. 26 experts from 18 European countries discussed the practical, financial and political impacts of digital archiving. It was the 1st in a workshop series called « Management strategies for film archives in the digital era », which will be continued in 2013.

8 March 2012. During the EFG1914 kick-off meeting on 27/28 February, more than 40 representatives from the 25 partner institutions came together in the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Among others, film archives from France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands will digitize up to 650 hours of film – newsreels, documentaries, propaganda and anti-war films – from and about World War I, and make the digitized collections available online through the EFG Portal www.europeanfilmgateway.eu and Europeana (www.europeana.eu). With the Imperial War Museums in London, probably the largest institutional World War I related film collection is part of the project. The films are expected to become available over the next two years, just in time for the 2014 centenary. With EFG1914, a major European co-operation project enters a new phase: During the last three years (2008-2011), The European Film Gateway became a frequently used web portal for finding films and film-related material from the film archives and cinémathèques of Europe, making available more than 500.000 objects to date. Apart from EFG1914, currently two other projects from the Europeana Group are dealing with WWI: Europeana 1914-1918 collecting family memorabilia and Europeana Collections 1914-1918 making available material from national library collections. EFG1914 is co-funded by the Community programme ICT-PSP. Read the EFG1914 press release (en); french version Find more about EFG1914 and its project partners on www.efg1914.eu

The final report of the Study on a Digital Agenda for European Film Heritage is available on-line. The Study was launched in January 2011 to assess the impact of digitisation for European film archives. It has been conducted by peacefulfish Productions Ltd, subcontractors were Red Cat Technologies, the University of Helsinki/IPR University Center and the external expert Nicola Mazzanti. Read the full report Executive summary available in en, fr, de More information on the DAEFH study

19 September 2011 – On 13 and 14 October, film makers, curators and historians, technicians, and producers, will meet at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris to discuss the transition from analogue to digital and its impact on the founding missions of cinematheques : to collect, conserve, restore and show. The symposium will focus on 4 topics:

19 September 2011 – The Cinema Experts Group – Subgroup Film Heritage is a platform offered by the Commission’s Audiovisual Policy and Media Unit to present and discuss projects, policies and best practices related to film heritage. This year’s meeting will focus on film heritage online (The European Film Gateway, Europeana), support models for film digitisation and copyright issues. It is hosted by the Cinematek in Brussels .

27 July 2011 – After nearly three years of preparation and development, the European Film Gateway – EFG is now online. The portal to the digital collections of European film archives and cinémathèques offers free access to currently about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials. By September, the number of digital items will increase to 600,000 from 16 film archives.

« The European Film Gateway creates a central online access to Europe’s film heritage for the first time. Previously, this remarkable record of 20th century European cinema had been dispersed on different national platforms, » says Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut, which co-ordinates the project. « Now the films and information about them are more accessible, not only to scholars, journalists and creatives, but also by a broader audience interested in film. »

« EFG also provides access to material in film archives that was hitherto hardly known, and some is now online for the first time, » says project manager Georg Eckes. These include unique magic lantern slide collections from France, erotic films made in Austria in the early 20th century, advertising films from Norway, newsreels from Lithuania and a comprehensive film poster collection from Denmark. Hidden treasures can be discovered from 15 European countries. Cinecittá Luce from Rome, for example, contributes not only a famous Italian newsreel collection reporting on important film-related events and persons, but also a fine collection of early films by great masters like Rossellini, Antonioni, Comencini, and other famous names of Italian filmmaking. An extensive collection of set photos to films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder contributed by the Deutsches Filminstitut will be available for the first time online from August on.

Users of the portal can search for people, for example Marlene Dietrich, but also by film title or keywords. They get an overview of related digital objects from the film archives which can be viewed directly in the portal. The portal always links back to the website of the relevant archives, and therefore also works as a search engine for selected digital holdings of European film archives.

EFG is a component of Europeana, the platform for the cultural heritage of Europe. EFG gathers the indexing and access information, so-called « metadata », and provides it to Europeana in a structured form. By doing so, the European Film Gateway and Europeana bring together the collections of European film archives with holdings of libraries, archives and museums in Europe, and put them in a transnational and multicultural context.

The EFG portal is the result of the EFG project which was developed by the Deutsches Filminstitut together with the Association des Européennes Cinémathèques and its members. It started in September 2008 and will end in September 2011. The coordination of the project lies with the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt am Main. It will operate the site on behalf of the project partners even after the project period has ended. The technological infrastructure was provided by the IT research institute of the Italian national research council, CNR-ISTI in Pisa. The project was funded by the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission.

8 June 2011 – More than 10,000 titles of dossiers relating to films, personalities and other categories can now be researched online. Within the next years, this number will increase to over 50,000 dossiers. The database allows he materials themselves cannot be displayed or downloaded. Detailed information about the content of each individual dossier can be obtained by an online request. The « results list » represents the materials held by the Museum, which can then be viewed on-site with requests made in advance.

Acquisition of film-related materials and documents by the Film Museum dates back to the founding of the institution in 1964.

The collection contains materials and documents produced throughout the process of making movies, such as treatments, scripts, promotional materials, press kits, screening invitations, advertisements, reviews, distribution catalogs, magazines, newspaper articles and clippings, as well as unbound documents which may contain brief film descriptions or production-related information. These documents include filmmaker bios and filmographies, interviews, obituaries, and correspondence including letters, postcards and greeting cards. Another aspect of the collection is focused on film festivals, exhibitions and retrospectives, as well as technical developments in cinema and film projection, represented through materials such as program notes, exhibition catalogs, brochures and manuals.

These materials are stored in acid-free paper envelopes (numbered consecutively) in files separated into categories: Film, Personalities, Institutions, Companies, Film Festivals, Exhibitions/Retrospectives, and Technical. The file titles and groups are searchable via the database. Screenplays, along with festival and rental catalogs are stored separately.

It is the Museum’s policy to make as many materials as possible available to students as well as scholars. Open and « barrier-free » access to the collections via online search helps create transparency as well as a connection to both academics and researchers.

27 May 2011 – On 24 May 2011, the European Commission adopted a Proposal for a Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works with a view to establishing common rules on the digitisation and online display of so-called orphan works. Orphan works are works like books, published articles and films that are still protected by copyright but whose authors are not known or cannot be located or contacted to obtain copyright permissions.

According to a study ACE carried out among its member archives in 2009, about 21% of the films held in Europe’s film archives and cinematheques are estimated to be orphan works. But with no common rules available to make the digitisation and online display of orphan works legally possible, they are doomed to remain untouched and therefore inaccessible. In order to proceed with large-scale digitisation projects such as the Europeana portal, common guidelines on how to deal with such works are necessary.

The Proposal forsees a new EU law providing lawful, cross-border online access to orphan works. Libraries, museums and archives in the EU country where a work was first published would be required to conduct a thorough search to find the copyright holder before creating a digital version. If the rightholder cannot be identified or located, the work would be identified as an « orphan » and that status would apply throughout the EU so that the work could be made available online without prior authorisation until the owner is identified and found.